Increasing Employees' Willingness to Share: Introducing Appeal Strategies for People Analytics

Increasingly digital workplaces enable advanced people analytics (PA) that can improve work, but also implicate privacy risks for employees. These systems often depend on employees sharing their data voluntarily. Thus, to leverage the potential benefits of PA, companies have to manage employees' disclosure decision. In literature, we identify two main strategies: increase awareness or apply appeal strategies. While increased awareness may lead to more conservative data handling, appeal strategies can promote data sharing. Yet, to our knowledge, no systematic overview of appeal strategies for PA exists. Thus, we develop an initial taxonomy of strategies based on a systematic literature review and interviews with 18 experts. We describe strategies in the dimensions of values, benefits, and incentives. Thereby, we present concrete options to increase the appeal of PA for employees.Comment: Peer-reviewed version accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Software Business (ICSOB 2022

A Synthesized Perspective on Privacy and Transparency in the Digital Workplace

The pandemic crisis has made the digitalization of workplaces imperative for many organizations. Besides reorganizing work, rapid advances in technologies also enhance organizational efficiency and enable remote work. Having to work completely digitally imposes unprecedented transparency on employees. A major consequence of the transparent workplace is the emergence of employees’ privacy concerns. Even though the concepts of transparency and privacy are closely related, there is a research gap regarding the relationship between the two. Based on a conceptual approach and a systematic literature review, we postulate a synthesis of transparency and privacy in the digital workplace, and outline directions for future research. We discuss what makes the relationship between the two constructs double-edged by introducing the privacy-transparency paradox. This study therefore adds to the literature on privacy and transparency in the digital workplace and forms the basis for further studies

A Journey, not a Destination—A Synthesized Process of Digital Transformation

Digital transformation (DT) continues to shake up firms and societies at large. Despite a growing number of studies covering a wide array of aspects of DT’s content, evidence of how DT unfolds in firms remains fragmented. Thus far, the literature has provided punctual insights into firms’ DT processes through single and multiple case studies. However, we lack a holistic understanding of the DT process. Adopting a qualitative meta-synthesis, we analyze 64 cases to inductively develop a DT process model depicting six phases (i.e., initiating, preparing, mobilizing, implementing, disseminating, and iterating). The process evolves on two levels—one rather sequential and one non-linear. We contribute to literature by introducing a synthesized process model tailored to DT’s complex nature. Besides, our model provides practitioners with a frame for assessing the progress of their DT journey and outlining a roadmap for their digital endeavor

Augmented Facilitation: Designing a multi-modal Conversational Agent for Group Ideation

Human facilitators face the challenge to structure and collect relevant insights from collaborative creative work sessions, which can suffer if they face a high workload. Hence, for effective value co-creation in organizational ideation we suggest an facilitation augmentation with a conversational agent (CA). CAs have the ability to support respective collaborative work by documenting and analyzing unstructured data. Following the design science research paradigm, and based on the literature about facilitation and human-AI collaboration, we derive design principles to develop a CA prototype that collects ideas from a group ideation session and displays them back in a structured (multi-modal) manner. We evaluate the CA by conducting four focus groups. Key findings show that the CA successfully distills and enriches information. Our study contributes to understanding the role of CA in augmenting facilitation and it provides guidance for practice on how to integrate these technologies in group meetings

Leading Agents or Stewards? Exploring Design Principles for Empowerment through Workplace Technologies

Workplace technologies lead to increasing levels of transparency for managers and employees. On the one hand, transparency facilitates novel styles of work, but on the other hand, it drives employee privacy concerns. Despite the technical possibilities to monitor employees, workforce demands empowerment leadership and challenges the assumptions from agency theory. Thus, following a design science research process and collaborating closely with the software provider SoftCo over three years, we aim to develop a suitable technical solution to the changing needs. We build on the knowledge base of stewardship theory, the concept of transparency, and existing market solutions. The design cycles are driven by literature search and empirical investigations, such as qualitative interviews at SoftCo. In this research-in-progress paper, we derive design requirements, design principles, and design features for digital leadership innovations that facilitate stewardship behavior and outline our further research agenda